Peter Seibel - Coders at Work - Reflections on the craft of programming

Seibel:You just mentioned taking a scientist’s approach to debugging. Do you consider yourself a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a craftsman?

Fitzpatrick:Either scientist or engineer. Probably more engineer. I would say scientist was second, but only in the sense of the scientific method of changing one thing at a time and how you diagnose problems. Engineer for the design aspect of things. I definitely have friends who call themselves artists or craftsmen. I’ve never thought of myself as that.

Seibel:On the other hand, there’s a lot of engineering envy in software. You hear the jokes about, “If people built skyscrapers the way we build software, the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.” Do you think building software is a well-understood engineering discipline?

Fitzpatrick:No. I don’t think it’s there yet. You don’t need a license, right, to write code. Not that I want tons of regulation, but it would be nice to know that some of these PHP programmers with these XSS exploits aren’t the same people writing the air-traffic-control system. I’d like there to be some official line between those people.

I have a friend who’s a structural engineer and he went to school forever and took all this engineering certification stuff. It’s kind of comforting to know that the people who build the bridges I’m on studied this shit forever and took tons of tests and stayed up all the time studying.

Seibel:But what test could you give a programmer that would give you confidence that they can write software that will work?

Fitzpatrick:I don’t know. It’s kind of scary.

Seibel:Even without licensing, do you think programmers have any sort of special ethical responsibilities to society? We’re arguably a profession, and professions have codes of conduct.

Fitzpatrick:You shouldn’t kill anyone. Like with flight-control software. But that’s kind of a rare case. I would like to ask that everyone is consistent on their credit-card forms to like let me put in fucking spaces or hyphens. Computers are good at removing that shit. Don’t tell me how to format my numbers. But there’s no ethics there. Just stupidity.

Seibel:You’re 28 now. Do you have any worries that programming is sort of a young person’s game, that you’re going to lose a step as you get older?

Fitzpatrick:No. The worst case, I could always just stop and work on fun things on my own. I don’t feel like I’m competing with anyone right now and I don’t really care if other people are better because I feel like there are tons of people who are better already. I figure we are always in the middle anyway, so I’m happy to stay in the middle.

Seibel:So programming is what you’d do for fun, even if you quit working?

Fitzpatrick:Oh, yeah. I’d still do stupid shit. I have this silly board game on my phone. I was kind of tired—I couldn’t work on anything serious, so I wrote a solver for that game. Tried to do some dynamic programming and did different board sizes and did a bunch of random boards and made a histogram of how many moves it takes to solve the board for different board sizes. I sent it to the author because the game has a really bad estimate of par. Basically, to advance in the game you have to do better than par. And everyone on the mailing list was noticing that the game got easier as you went on because his estimate of par he kind of pulled out of nowhere. So I sent him the histograms at every board size. I think in the new version of the game he adjusted par. That was a fun hack, just on the shuttle home. I could retire and just do dumb shit like that all day.

A senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!, Douglas Crockford has been a programmer since the early ’70s when he took a Fortran course in college after being unable to get studio time for his major in television broadcasting. Over the course of his career, he has combined computers with media in various ways at places like Atari, Lucasfilm, Electric Communities, and now Yahoo!

Crockford is, by nature, a simplifier and a tidier. He invented JSON, the data interchange format widely used in Ajax applications, because he found XML too complicated. His recently published book, JavaScript: The Good Parts, argues that JavaScript is actually quite a nice language if one avoids certain features. When I talked to him he stressed the importance of subsetting as a way of managing complexity and described a code-reading process he uses that starts with simply tidying up the code.

At the time of our interview, Crockford had become well known as an outspoken critic of the proposed ECMAScript 4 (ES4) revision to the ECMAScript (JavaScript) language standard, on the grounds that it was too complex. He was in favor of a more modest proposal labeled ES3.1, and since then he and the other ES3.1 advocates have largely prevailed—ES3.1 has been renamed ES5, and the ES4 effort has been officially abandoned.

Crockford and I talked about what he disliked about the ES4 proposal, the importance of code reading as a team activity, and how to move the Web forward despite the legacy of existing systems.

Seibel:How did you start programming?

Crockford:I went to San Francisco State University. I went there because they had a really good television program. My first year I couldn’t get into the studio so I looked for other things to take and sort of as a fluke I took a Fortran class in the math department. And it turned out I was really good at it so I took the second-semester class.

That was ’71, ’72. It was punch cards in the basement of the library. Timesharing had just come to the school. At San Francisco State we didn’t have a strong engineering department that owned all the computers. Instead they got distributed all over the school. Natural sciences had a lab; school of business had a lab; school of education had a lab; and humanities had a lab. Which was really interesting in that you had all these disciplines all playing with computers.

I went to work first in the science lab and then in the humanities lab. So I’d have people coming in who were economists or psychologist or geographers—they were the most interesting people. I’d learn about the problems that they were working on and I developed a lot of sensitivity really early on to the concerns of normal people as they play with these terrible machines and started looking at how we can make this stuff better for them.

Eventually I got into the studios and did all the TV stuff and that was fun but in the end I decided to go the computer way. But all along I spent a lot of time thinking about the two things together. I anticipated a lot of what would become multimedia and now digital media, and at various times in my career I’ve gone back and done the media part and then returned to the programming part.

Seibel:So you started with Fortran and discovered that you were good at it. Was there anything that drew you to programming other than, “Oh, I seem to be good at this.”?

Crockford:That’s all it was. It was my first semester, and I had to take a math class and I had picked one of those at random and it happened to have Fortran in it. So I didn’t go into it intending to learn how to program. It was just what happened.

Seibel:What was the first interesting program you remember writing?

Crockford:That’s going way back. I think it was a program I wrote to disassemble the runtime of the Fortran system on the timesharing system I was using. By doing that, I was able to read how that system worked and taught myself a lot about programming based on that model, something which would not ordinarily have been published.